failed hard drive = XP reboot loop, help please

L

liquidmonkey

Disciple
I have 4 hard drives and one of them failed the other day when I was trying to play a video clip. When trying to play it with WMP9 it would freeze so then I had to go into ‘task manager’ and ‘end the process’. I did this 2 times and then the 3rd time my computer shut down and went into a looped re-boot mode.
PC Boot would be good, the windows logo screen would come up, but then it would disappear and a blue error screen would come up for a split second. I have not been able to see what the specific error as the computer goes to re-boot but have seen it say ‘windows has been halted to prevent damage from occurring to your computer’ or something like that.
I was very worried in the beginning but after unplugging each HD, I have concluded which HD is the cause. So at least everything else works ok, whew!
One other thing to mention is that the failing HD is a Maxtor 160Gig SATA drive filled with only 250MB empty. I’m thinking this is a cause but not sure.
Does anyone know of something I could try to get this drive working again? I do need the information on it.
Thanks in advance :clap:

PS – after this scare I did a major back-up of all other important info I could access.
 
Came across the Powermax utility at maxtors site - I have never run it ....

Whats the Power Supply in your computer ?
The PowerMax utility is designed to perform diagnostic read/write verifications on Maxtor and Quantum hard drives. These tests will determine hard drive integrity. The PowerMax utility is effective on all ATA (IDE) hard drives with a capacity greater than or equal to 500 MB. Maxtor recommends the use of this utility for troubleshooting potential hard drive problems. These problems include, but are not limited to the following:

Potential hard drive surface problems (e.g., bad clusters, bad sectors, partitioning/formatting problems, etc.).
Drive recognition problems (e.g. hard drive that is not recognized by the operating system).
Software removal.
Click to expand...

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...oftware Downloads/All Downloads&downloadID=22
 
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